Expect Stage 4 load shedding from 12pm

South Africa’s state power utility Eskom said on Wednesday that it would implement deeper “Stage 4” power cuts from midday until 5 a.m. on Friday because of a further loss of generation capacity.

From 5 a.m. on Friday until 5 a.m. on Saturday the scheduled outages will be scaled back to Stage 2, which requires up to 2,000 megawatts (MW) to be shed from the grid compared to 4,000 MW under Stage 4.

Eskom is regularly forced to implement outages in Africa’s most industrialised economy because of faults at its ailing coal-fired power station fleet.